iBeacons In Retail Stores Blowing Up Engagement | Well What Do I Know?

Conventional wisdom (aka – me) isn’t always right. I had a feeling that lining stores with iBeacons that would bombard patrons with unsolicited notifications would be a complete turn-off for customers. Maybe it’s just me; maybe I was wrong!?

iBeacons installed by inMarket in grocery stores across the country have not experienced this, rather app and ad engagement has skyrocketed since rolling out the platform:

Successful geofencing improves the consumer experience while increasing engagement value for brands. With today’s data release, we now have proof that consumers appreciate this value in a measurable way: They’re more likely to keep apps that use beacon messaging, and they’re more likely to interact with advertised products in-store thanks to beacons,” said Todd Dipaola, CEO of inMarket. “When we launched M2M in January, we set out to improve the shopping experience for brands, retailers and consumers. M2M is the first platform to showcase these exciting improvements at scale.”

Apparently, interactions with advertised products increased by 19x. In other words, an almost 20x increase in the number of users interacting with advertised products in these apps all thanks to the location-aware iBeacon notification. InMarket also tells disclosed that not just ads but app engagement in general is up following its iBeacon roll out. App usage was 16.5x greater for users who received a beacon message vs those who did not. Finally, users receiving an iBeacon notification are 6.4x more likely to keep an app on their phone. That shows us that customers are finding these iBeacons notifications useful and as a result less users end up deleting the app. Harumph!